Managing Internal Stakeholders with Jenny McLean from the University of Calgary

In the first episode of The Client's Side, Jenny McLean from the University of Calgary comes on to discuss how complicating managing several stakeholders can be and how an agency can help make her the hero.

Transcript

Intro

You're listening to the first episode of the client-side, brought to you by The Inbound Lab. I'm Derek Hovinga, and this is my new podcast where I speak to folks who are on the client-side of a marketing or creative partnership. And I'm really excited because in this first episode, I wanted to have my friend Jenny McLean on. Jenny is the manager of strategic marketing and communications in the research department at the University of Calgary. I wanted to have her on because she's the perfect example of being a client who has a number of complexities in an organization that may affect the client and marketing partner relationship. We’ll talk about the difficulties of having a large chain of command, both academic and government stakeholders. And we'll talk about some of the limitations and organization of this scale may have and how that might cause some complications in getting work across the finish line. So thanks for tuning in. And here's the interview.

0:59: Friendly banter to start the interview.

1:58 : We talk about Jenny McLean

Derek - Why don't you give us a little bit of a brief origin story, so to speak, who you are, your marketing experience, who you've worked for, and all that fun stuff.

Jenny - Okay, so I took a really non-traditional path to marketing. I went to school for broadcasting originally. And when I started as a new grad, I was working as a television editor. And that was wonderful. I loved it, it was very technically focused. And, you know, I got to experience all of the magic of TV, which was, which was the reason that I got into television in the first place. But of course, 2008 or 2009 the recession hit, and in 09 I found myself looking for jobs. But you know, I could apply for a newsroom tape job and hope to make maybe $15 an hour like that was sort of the option at that point. And so, you know, my kind of financial reality and my, you know, my ego, and my pride didn't let me follow that path. So I started looking at what else I could do. And because I had the technical skills from being an editor, I had gotten pretty handy with Adobe Creative Suite. I was feeling okay about my graphic design skills, maybe not enough to be a graphic designer, but I was like this is the marketing world is maybe where I could use my transferable skills. And thanks to the dissolution of the production company I was working with, I wound up with a totally legal copy of Creative Suite three, which at the time was, you know, it used to be subscription base, I don't know what the cost would have been to buy that $1,000 maybe, which, as a new grad just seemed totally impossible. So I really leveraged that. And so I created some portfolio pieces and started applying for marketing coordinator jobs and graphic design jobs. And I got really lucky with Rocky Mountain equipment. That's it's the tractor dealership just north of the city by cross iron Mills. Yeah, totally weird. But I think the reason they actually even looked at my resume was that I actually had a bit of experience working as a service advisor during college at a heavy truck dealership. And so I had a little bit of exposure to like that, that world. And so the VP of Marketing had me come in for an interview and unexpectedly a skills test, which, you know, it's nice when they tell you about that. So he sat me down in front of this computer, and he's like, Okay, I need you to make a brochure and do some Excel as like, Oh, God. Okay, so I had never used InDesign before, but I was pretty happy with Illustrator. And I was like, I know, my journalism friends use InDesign for stuff, and I'm sure that's what they need to use, but I'm just gonna whip this up in Illustrator. He might not know like, I don't know what he knows. And so he was impressed by that. I totally failed the Excel test but he saw enough potential in me To bring me in and helped me to develop that talent. So, so it was it was a really good learning experience. I also learned how to code and design for the web. And I really got to develop my graphic design skills. And so after about a year, being a young person, I was ready to move to the next thing. I move over to foremost industries, which was a specialized heavy equipment manufacturer, they've been around since the 40s. They started out building these little tract trucks that go into like, the swamps and mosques and like northern remote territories. And in the 80s and 90s. They built those big glacier buses for tourists. And actually, after I'd been there for a few years, we got a contract for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to build some specialized equipment to launch some balloons. Oh, wow, very cool. That was really exciting. Now, you

Derek - Wait now you could say one of your clients was NASA, you've had experience with NASA!

Jenny - might be a bit of a stretch. I was not allowed to talk to the NASA people when they came, but…

Derek - …that's okay. One time I did a video shoot for Lexus… of Royal Oak. And I always just talk about how “Yeah, I've worked with companies, big companies, like, you know, Lexus…” but it was just the dealership.

Jenny - That's not nothing though, right? People like to hear those things.

6:25: We discuss Jenny’s role at the University of Calgary.

Jenny - I was kind of ready for a break from the oil and gas world. And I took on a one-year, Mat-leave coverage position at the University of Calgary, I truly had no idea what I was walking into, I just figured I'd heard wonderful things about working for the university. And I thought it might be a nice reprieve. And I would do a year and then move back to whatever, whatever else came along. So I came into the vice president research office, which is an office that I didn't know existed until I joined it. And, and it's a really interesting job. So my role is the manager of strategic marketing and communications in the VP research office. Now, the university's huge, every faculty, and many of the administrative units have their own Mark comm staff. And there's this massive central team called advancement, and they're responsible for like institutional fundraising, and things like that. So there are a lot of marketers on campus. So my job is a bit funny because most people never realize what the research enterprise of university looks like, it operates pretty silently. And so my job tends to fall under the radar a little bit because it's part of that. And, you know, we're really involved with developing and delivering strategies to advance research initiatives, create programs, we identify and promote funding opportunities, we help to generate and facilitate partnerships between researchers and industry members, and community as well, we're always promoting our researchers and the work that they do, because some of them obviously, is doing very, very cool stuff. And most of what the public hears about this is occasionally when one of those things hits the media, and the media relations is certainly part of the job. But it's a very small kind of sliver of it for us. So when we talk about marketing and communications, in that context, it's not quite what I expected. It's not quite what most people expect. But all of the principles that you apply across any kind of marketing role do apply. And we're very fortunate to have a leader of a vice president who has a very strategic mindset. And he's, he's eager to think things through and do things spent spend her time and resources strategically and carefully. So we manage I think, 15 websites, we're creating collateral and promoting our various research institutes, and individual researchers. So we're doing media pitches and things like that. And we're also really involved in a lot of the development of systems and tools. So one project I'm working on right now is the product marketing for this massive piece of software technology that researchers need to use as part of their job. And, and it's really exciting because it's actually a province-wide collaboration, to connect multiple systems at different universities. And it's really exciting, but it's one of these things that nobody would ever know about and wouldn't be able to use effectively and maximize its benefits unless we did a really strong job of marketing it. And so, you know, it seems like that's a pretty small audience. But we're also then marketing that to the Alberta ecosystem that the healthcare ecosystem, and also the Big Pharma and biotech guys that want to come in and do their clinical trials here in Alberta. So there's these there's all of these layers and different audiences that we have to consider. Each project is super unique, so it's a really exciting place to do marketing.

9:55 - Talk about outsourcing your marketing to an external agency

Jenny - Yeah, so we have, we've brought in agencies and creative firms on all kinds of projects, the types of things would be video content creation. So we've brought in a few different firms for that we've had them come in to help us develop sub-brands to develop, you know, marketing, like really robust marketing plans for like the rollout of a significant research a center or Institute to build custom web apps is another thing because we have, we have quite a few web apps that we have, that my team has developed with, with creative firms. And so, you know, in a large organization like the university, it can be kind of tough for a few reasons. The first one being that a lot of large organizations will require you to use a preferred vendors list. And, and that can be really frustrating. And we've gone through phases where we were, we must use that list versus that it's, it's just a guideline, and it can be really limiting because not everybody's on it, the people who are on it are obviously very busy. You know, and they're usually big, flashy firms who have very, like, you know, large budgets and who are used to working with, with a lot of money and procedure clients, obviously, the University wouldn't be a procedure client, but budget for us is obviously a bit of a different story than a private sector client. So. So that's, that's one challenge. And then the other challenge, obviously, is that in a large organization, the chain of command, the approval process, the time that it takes to do stuff, it can drag out because priorities are constantly shifting, and there are often things that, you know, like, the government is announcing some new thing, or we have some dignitary visiting campus like that just we can't ignore, and so things just have to slow down. And so, so, in my experience, I think, working without outsourced firms, like I had a much easier time of that when I was in the private sector because we could move as fast as we want, I might have had to get one level of approval above me, maybe that's it. Now, there's, there are varying levels of approval, both above me but also laterally, we have to make sure all of these different stakeholders are engaged in all these different units at the university collaborate on many different things. And you know, some there are a lot of like sensitivities about who's responsible for what, who owns what, where is the budget coming from, for things and making sure that we're respecting each part of that, as you can imagine, that gets very time-consuming as well.

Derek - Do you have a team that helps you or is it just you and a couple of people and you're trying to manage all that internally, while also liaison with the creative firms that you're working with outside of the organization?

Jenny - So I very fortunate, I do have a team of three full-time staff. And depending on the time of year, or the budget situation, I often have two or three other part-time or temporary staff, we all kind of have the different files that we manage. But it is a very lean team for the work that we do. And because of the budget, I would just hire two more staff members tomorrow. But you know, we're very fortunate that we've been able to keep our team together with, you know, the public sector is just facing budget cuts all over the place. So we're feeling very fortunate, we're trying to, you know, be grateful for that and leverage what we have to the best of our ability. And then when we do bring in those third-party firms, it's always a bit of a cost-benefit, because some firms require a lot of hand-holding. And if they haven't worked with the university before, it's guaranteed, there's a lot of hand-holding there. Some of them also have expectations that we do things like write the script, or you know, for the video shoot, or that we storyboard something, or that we are doing all of the implementations. So for me, like I, I always stop and ask myself, what do I really need? And what am I really gonna benefit from when bringing in a creative firm, and we've had wins and we've had not, I'm not gonna say losses or, or misses, but we've had somewhere it wasn't, it was I wouldn't categorize it as strong way, you know, you know, we get through the project, the money is spent, but we don't quite get that resolution at the end. And part of that is because a lot of creative firms just don't they're not familiar with this working with an organization of this scale. And they don't build that those time contingencies into their plan or into their budget. So in my experience, but what has happened is, the nice thing about a large organization like ours is we're accustomed to doing the strategic planning process to doing discovery and doing some planning and doing You know, goal setting and positioning and action planning, and all of that before we get to execution. So we're open to that. But the challenge is that firms love to do that stuff, which is great. But the challenge for us is that in my experiences, they underestimate how long it takes to hurdle the cats to get through that process and get approval at various steps. And so that we end up eating up so much of the budget through that process that when it comes to execution, we don't always have time left in the budget. And for us budget is everything, we can't just tack on another 10 grand or 20 grand to get it over the finish line. It's kind of like, okay, so you did the wireframes for the website. But now I am going to build the website because we're out of budget. And, and so like that, for me has been the biggest challenge, I think, is that I try to articulate how much time it takes, they're trying to keep their cost estimate down. So that will hire them. And it's just this real fine balance. So that's, for me, that's I think, the biggest challenge and to any creative firm that wanted to work with large organizations, I would say, like, have a frank conversation about timelines and approvals, because you know, what you expect. And, you know, he might expect things to run a little long, as you would with an average project, you got to like double or triple with some large organizations.

16:16 - Talk about onboarding an external partner and how best to do it.

Jenny - In most cases, I'll write an RFP, if I'm asking for multiple proposals. And in that, I really try to be as clear and explicit as possible. So those RFPs, maybe three or five pages, but you know, I try to give everything that I know, I try to put it onto the page in a very organized fashion so that we're not missing anything. There's, there's no oh, well, I guess I should have told you x y, Zed. You know, but of course, you can only communicate so much without that background context. And so, so first, there's that RFP, and then, and then I always write a project brief no matter what, whether I'm working with an external group or not, actually, that's something that we do, as part of our workflow. And in the project brief, like we're really getting into listing things like assumptions, considerations, sensitivities, like listing the stakeholders, you know, really identifying where we might run into problems, or where we might run into barriers.

Derek - I could tell you, a lot of firms appreciate the risk management there. Like for websites, for instance, it helps them decide, you know, what type of project management style they might be doing, whether that's an agile type of thing, or, or there are so many people that need to go through the approval process, it might not work. So yeah, risk management within those RFPs is super important. And through those project briefs as well.

Jenny - Yeah, I find that just having like, you know, a frank conversation about a few of the key challenges that I expect, you know, that might not be something I put into a document into the project brief, but it might be like, hey, so now that you've got that project brief open in front of you, I just wanted to flag items, amb. Because here's some extra context that you're going to need. You know, because if we're going into a meeting with subject matter experts, we've got the account manager and a project manager and a creative person and a writer, and they're coming into a room to meet with, you know, some executives or some superstar researchers who have, like 15 minutes and not a minute more, I need them to be prepared for that. You know, because the creative world kind of think, Oh, well, this is obviously the most important thing that everybody has on their plate right now. And I can tell you that for the university, a lot of the projects that we work on, we get that the agency team is sitting down at the doctor, the doctor is in and out of the room because he's on call. And then he's like, he's getting through it as fast as possible. And his mind is working at lightning speed. And the rest of us are just like we're working at regular speed. And so it can be really, really hard to get through some of these things and to feel like you're being successful when it's very clear that you're not priority one or two, or even three, your priority 17 for most of the people who you're engaging with.

19:10 - On checking your agency ego at the door

Jenny: it is definitely it's an ego check. And I would just say that like, for most people on my team, especially, but also when I'm working with, with third-party vendors, I have to remind people like this is not about you. It's not personal. It's really, really not like we're so so we have to adjust our approach to meet the stakeholders where they're at, if we're talking to superstar researcher, or if we're talking to one of the executives like they have so much on the go that we just have to be as efficient and effective as possible. If they're cutting you off or if If they're not quite giving you what you need, you have to kind of stop and reevaluate how you meet them where they're at. Because like I said, being a low priority, it can be an ego hit. But it's also very freeing, because you're like, Okay, like, this does not need to be anything fancy, I don't need to Wow, anybody, like, they're going to be wowed. If we get through the interview questions in 15 minutes or less, and then we can get them out the door, and then we can debrief, and then we can talk about it. And then we can pull apart all of the different things that were said, and that we heard. So it's humbling, but it's also it's by nature, this job working in a university is very humbling. I work with people who, who have come up with new ways to treat stroke patients, so that you know, 50% of them get their life back where they wouldn't have before. Like, that's incredible. I can't do that kind of thing. So for me, it is it's very humbling. But it makes it easy to say like, I just need a sliver of this guy's time. And you know, and that's really beneficial. And we're going to maximize that. And then we take that and run with it. Because at the end of the day, he's going to love what we do, because we get it. And so so that's, that's one of the challenges, I think, for me is that most people don't operate with that mindset. And so it's a bit of an orientation, coming into that environment.

Derek - You know, I've always had this mindset that it's not necessarily about the marketer, or it's not necessarily about the agency person or the creative firms. It's mostly about the client, right? And that's why I started this podcast. So how could create a firm? or How could a marketing supplier make you the hero? In your companies? Like, what makes you look good in front of the Vice President, so to speak?

21:36 - How can agencies make you look good in front of your boss?

Jenny - I would say, deep understanding of the objectives and what the deliverables need to be. And that can be really hard to achieve. But, you know, through a strong discovery process, and frank conversations with the person that you're working with, it can be achieved, you know, we're Product Marketing, a new piece of technology. And we had a firm do branding on that. And it was great, the branding was beautiful. But then they were also trying to help us with content, and then also with the website, and we sort of just ran out of time. But even though I wouldn't call that a giant win, the visuals that they created, and the key messaging that hit on the core of the objectives that came out of that, that gave me a massive when everybody is really excited. That's, that's really easy to do when you have a product that people are really stoked about already. But, but some of those core pieces are really key. And so it can be really easy to get distracted with all that extra stuff, and maybe not deliver as strongly oppose central components. But you know, if you have to choose to get the central pieces, right, and really strong, I think is where, in my experience, I've had my I've had agencies make me look like a hero.

22:56 - On what keeps Jenny up at night.

Jenny - Honestly, what keeps me up at night is failing to deliver that message. I mean, communications are in everything, marketing is in everything. So when we have our project going out of university, like it doesn't matter how cool it is, if we don't have a strategy to get it out to the world, or, or if we have a strategy and we don't execute, well, that can be really disheartening. Because at the end of the day, you know, we work for an organization that is doing research that's trying to change the world, we are training the next generation of humans who are going to run the world. And so what keeps me up at night is being spread too thin, not being able to devote enough time, to the things that really matter. And I think that's where agencies can really support, you know because there are agencies who really need a lot of hand-holding and the agencies that don't. And, and I don't know, there's not like a magic button to like, distinguish between them. I think it's just about the people and their willingness to really dig into the content and the objectives they have in front of them. But when I have a when I'm working with an agency who understands what we're trying to do, doesn't need a ton of hand-holding, and kind of go side by side of me to help to make sure that I can focus on that, but also these three or four or 35 other things, you know, we can make sure that we're actually delivering on our purpose and making sure that the world hears about the incredible inventions and innovations that are coming out of the University of Calgary.

24:28 - On Jenny’s side-gig as a marketing consultant for small businesses.

Jenny - I work with entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises and for growing companies, you know, and so it's a totally different dynamic in a lot of ways because they don't want to sit through discovery meetings. They don't want to sit through a strategic planning session, but in a lot of ways, it's very similar to you know, What we expected of agencies working with the university, it's that we need to very quickly get to the core of what they need to achieve, what their objectives are. And the fastest and often cheapest way to do that, you know, in similar to the university, you know, these clients don't have like there, a lot of them are running their own business, or running a small business where they're wearing a variety of hats, they don't have a marketing person, generally, they don't have time to sit through and, and talk about the nuances of web copy. And, and so you kind of have to make a lot of decisions and hope that they're the right ones. And in my experience, similar to the university, even though they're totally different ends of the spectrum, when I'm able to get the objectives really clear upfront and agreed upon, I can make a lot of those decisions based on learning that learning what I everything I can about the client and the background of their company, and their audience. And based on that knowledge that I'm able to gather, I can make decisions that are generally satisfactory for the client, I have a totally different process with these clients than what I would expect from a firm working for me at the university, where we would develop, you know, all of the strategic planning and the approach, and we write all the content, and we go back and forth and back and forth. For these smaller clients, I get that early information, I find out what they need, you know, for example, I will build a website and write all the copy and do the design and kind of show them in a near-finished product. Because you show them a wireframe, they're like, I don't get what I'm looking at. And I don't have time to ask questions. So I don't like it. And so I showed them in your finished product. And like nine times out of 10, they're stoked on it, you know, a few adjustments here and there, and we're off to the races. It's really, it feels really counterintuitive to the way a creative firm would typically work. But it's an approach that I've found has been really effective. It's also something that I think larger firms, I wouldn't actually hate to see that larger firms, because if they were to say, okay, we're going to learn everything that we can. And instead of like, you know, beating a dead horse, and trying to like hammer out all the copy before we even make wireframe. You know, like, get everything you can and if you feel like you have enough to make a, like a minimal viable product, we'll do it, build it out, let us see it and you know, like that can save so much time and effort. And so, you know, and it's part of it as a bit of maybe confidence and maybe a little overconfidence at times, but the but it's that agility and willingness to like take a bit of a risk. And it can really pay off.

Derek - That's really cool that you're able to adapt to, you know, your clients situation. I mean, that's awesome. You've been an awesome guest. And I'm so happy that I've been able to get you on because it made sense. Because working for a university and how many stakeholders you have, whether that's, you know, academic stakeholders, or government stakeholders, there could be a lot of frustrations for yourself and for any agency or any marketing firm or any, any type of creative firm that you're working with. So I really do appreciate you coming on to the podcast and talking a bit about it and trying to help us serve you better.

Outro

Derek - Boom! And that's the first episode done. Jenny was a great guest. And I had a lot of takeaways, and I hope you got to some of my takeaways.

1) In the discovery phase, it's important to have frank conversations to manage risks. So figure out who all the stakeholders are with the approval processes, and build in some contingencies. So you're not running out of budget and abandoning your client near the end of the project lifecycle.

2) Clients don't want to hold your hand throughout the projects. So it's important to work side by side, you know, collaboratively, but do your best to have the research done and be confident moving forward.

3) In an organization of this scale, you'll wow people if you're efficient. So not every meeting has to be a presentation where you're throwing a 72-page deck at the stakeholders. Keep it simple, keep it quick and you'll make your client look like a hero.

Thanks so much for tuning in next week. I'm going to have Jacqueline Tran from TELUS spark on to talk about What it's like right now working for a business that's focused on events and attractions during a pandemic and an era of government restrictions. I'm sure it's pretty tough. So tune in next time and we'll see you then.